June 29, 2010

Surely, somewhere among the 400 members of that former discussion group, there is someone who feels motivated to fulfill the desire of the information to be free. I've listed reasons why I think it would be doing a good thing to make the archive public, and now there is an additional motivation — $100,000. Now, virtue is mixed with venality. But virtue is mixed with venality when it comes to keeping the archive private. The motivations for not disclosing are not pure. People are protecting their careers, hoping for favors from powerful and well-placed co-Journolisters. Breitbart has added economic incentive to the other side of the balance, and he fortifies his offer of payment with an ethical argument:

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough....

ADDED: Mediaite thinks it's "unlikely" that any Journolister will spring for the $100,000. I don't really understand her argument. It only takes one person to decide to disclose. I think it's obvious someone with a mix of motives, including a desire for $100,000, is likely to do it. There's a great argument for transparency and freeing information — for the public good. I, personally, believe that argument. And it's impossible for me to believe that in a group that size, with that many people, people who are in competition with each other, that there isn't one person who feels on the outs and isn't interested in protecting anybody. Indeed, human nature being what it is, there are probably a few people who would love to see some of the prominent Journolisters exposed as... whatever the exposure would expose them as.

AND: Then there's the nothing-to-see-here-move-along gambit: Jonathan Chait insists that the conversations were "mundane..... requests for references... instantaneous reactions to events, joshing around, conversations about sports, and the like...." Matthew Yglesias portrays it as talk about sports, links to published articles, and "failed efforts to get an interesting discussion going."

Breitbart is a force of nature and I'm glad he's on my side, if I can put it that way. But if I were trying to convince someone to sell all of the archives to me, I wouldn't call the person who leaked part of the archives to someone else a "rat."

Let me suggest a difference. The Journolist was a group of "journalists" who apparently shared and coordinated stories. They portrayed themselves as impartial and independent. They weren't.

The list that you link to is owned by the House minority leader's office. It is obviously political. There are no pretenses to the contrary. And, I suspect there is much less peer-to-peer coordination and much more top-down communications.

It probably won't be one of the journolisters who turns this over, unless the server resided in someone's basment.

There's some system administrator out there who has access to the backups for that server, and 100K for a backup set will look mighty good. Especially since his name won't be anywhere on the list, and he has no loyalty to this or any other political cause.

People who are against the disclosure, are people who constantly rip other people behind their back. And you know why? Because they are cowards. Unable to look someone in the eye, and say what they think of them. They do this because those people are always fearful of getting their asses kicked.

This seems short sighted to me and I suspect will come back to bite us in the ass.

Conservatives are not the orthodoxy. Whatever we say or write will be judged to be more outside of the political mainstream than our counterparts on the left.

Do we really want to make it the norm that private conversations and e-mail discussions should from now on be made public? I have been in some private discussions among conservative activists/journalists were people spoke quite freely. I would not want those conversations to now be put out there for public consumption.

I appreciate that people are enjoying this sandbox dust up. But it seems more than a tad bit shortsighted, unprincipled and not well thought out.

...besides, anyone dumb enough to post incriminating or embarrassing material to an e-mail list with **400** people on it is too stupid to be a professional journalist.

I don't think there's anyone who is "too stupid to be a professional journalist." That seems a job requirement. Read any MSM article on a subject you're knowledable about and count the mistakes. It's only reasonable to believe that all of the other articles are equally inaccurate.

"Do we really want to make it the norm that private conversations and e-mail discussions should from now on be made public?"

I run an job-related e-mail list that has 150 people on it from 50 different organizations. I assume that anything I send to this list is subject to ending up on the front page of the local paper. You'd be a fool to believe anything different...

As an IT professional of 30 years, let me assure you that your e-mails remain private because no one along the data route cares to make them public. If you want your e-mails to remain private, encrypt them.

Never, ever assume that the only people seeing your data are you and the intended recipients. There's many hands involved in keeping modern IT infrastructure working, and almost all of those people have access at some point to your data once it leaves your PC.

I would hope there is at least one Jorno with enough integrity to disclose the archive without even taking money, but my opinion on journalists' integrity and courage is so low that I don't hold my breath for Journo whistleblower.

BTW, the left can stop with the snark, given the shrieking they did over Jeff Gannon.

I don't see what the big deal is. I know Insty quoted this guy saying 400 influential lefties got together regularly to coordinate their stories that they presented as independent in various media outlets.

Well, then, what you and your fellow Rightist bloggers need to do, Althouse, is to start making shit up...

Maybe some mid-rank blogger can write a post based on a fake conversation with a fabricated "liberal source" who will verify that, yes, indeed there was a concerted effort by liberal MSM reporters to portray your blog as anti-Semitic back in March 2009.

Then Instaputz and you both link to that post, and hopefully others will too.

That will either motivate one of the Jornolisters to leak the archives to prove that the claim is bullshit, or else it'll motivate one of them to leak it to prove that the claim is true.

Garage, et al: All the right wingers meet every night and plan out how we are going to screw the poor, the peoples of color, women and the transgendered. We talk about them one by one. No one ever breaks the code. Ever. We might, of course, if you waterboarded one of us which you wouldn't. Can't bribe us because we're all already rich and don't care if chili goes for $100 a bowl. Only the lefties can be corrupted so cheaply, so easily, in such a public and fun filled way.

The statements by Chait and Yglesias ("it was really boring") don't match with the first set of descriptions that were made around the time of the initial leak by Laus.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20086.html

“it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

"It's not an echo chamber. I have never seen a less echo chamber-like space in my life."

The frequent disputes among members, he said, are “what’s most entertaining on the list.”

“I’m very lazy about writing when I’m not getting paid,” Alterman said. “So if I take the trouble to write something in any detail on the list, I tend to cannibalize it. It doesn’t surprise me when I see things on the list on people’s blogs.”

Yeah Blake, because the revelation that the White House press office was basically employing an ex gay porn star who worked for a fake paper to ask softball questions during press conferences is EXACTLY the same thing as left of center journalists and policy people having a listserv.

Garage, et al: All the right wingers meet every night and plan out how we are going to screw the poor, the peoples of color, women and the transgendered.

It doesn't mean that at all. More likely, is both con and liberal wonk lists are probably excruciatingly boring. But I admit to enjoy watching Althouse, Breitbart, and the rest, just jonesing to look at this list. All that's missing is drunk-dialing and hanging up, doing drivebys Ezra Klein's office. Haha.

Yeah Blake, because the revelation that the White House press office was basically employing an ex gay porn star who worked for a fake paper to ask softball questions during press conferences is EXACTLY the same thing as left of center journalists and policy people having a listserv.

You could try being a little less hacky, Monty.

If you don't think it's worse for 400 "independent" journalists to collude on the "narrative" than for the WH to run a gay prostitution ring out of the Oval Office, you need to re-evaluate your standards.

All the people here jonesing for this -- where the fuck were you when Dick Cheney was running the National Energy Policy Development Group, leting oil executives set policy and then refusing to release any records of the meeting?

If it's just a lot of sports talk and the like, you'd think they'd be racing each other to collect that easy 100 grand.

I dunno, if I had the archive, it would already be in Breitbart's hands, and I'd be thinking about how I'd be able to pay all my debts and still have a nice big pile left over.

But I still don't get why it remains a big secret that there are at least two (maybe more)conservative list-servs just like JournoList. Is Breitbart on one of those? Why doesn't InstaPundit ever mention that they exist? Why is Althouse not at all interested in asking questions about them?

But I do think it's likely that they were occasionally talking smack about Althouse on JournoList, and even encouraged each other not to link to her. So I guess she has special reason to be interested in that list-serv.

dbp, your words, even in jest, are absent any redeeming quality. I'm going to take the high ground by hoping that no one ever thinks that you deserve misery, and takes it upon themselves to make it happen.

I would be surprised if a whole archive even exists. Who keeps all their e-mail? It seems unrealistic to think most subscribers even bothered to read half of it. The interest in this whole thing seems way over the top to me.

No Google employee is going to puke the list for $100k. It's most likely that the people with access all have stock options worth big huge chunks.

But more than a few people are sure to have a folder set up in their email client especially for JournoList traffic; and an email filter that copies it there automatically. (Anyone with Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes at the office does this to keep the email from the boss separate from the quasi junk that comes in every day.)

Just archive the emails into a folder, zip it up, send it to Andrew Breitbart, and you can pay off your credit cards, buy an SUV, and put a downpayment on that condo in Puerto Rico you've been looking at.

Do you know of any conservative blogger and/or journalist coordination system, Althouse? Anything that could be considered similar to Journolist, but for Righties?

Seems like you ought to set your readers straight on that since the perception among Lefties is that such a thing exists and that you might be a member of it. That would be in the spirit of "cruel neutrality", don't you think?

First, policy pimps in DC tend to target liberals more than conservatives. Liberals are for big government and carve-outs for different industries, so there's no payoff in co-opting a conservative.

Second, there are vastly more liberals in the media than there are conservatives. Radio talk show hosts are flaming egotists who don't talk to each other much; and it's a rather small club anyway. Beyond them and the little opinion journals, who do you have? Fox News? That's a pretty small field. And everybody knows each other; and they run into each other at CPAC every year. Moreover, the conservative playbook isn't something that's revised with each news cycle. So there's no reason to do a "Conservative JournoList."

But hey, if y'all uncover one, I'm sure George Soros can cough up a few bucks to buy the archive.

"All the people here jonesing for this -- where the fuck were you when Dick Cheney was running the National Energy Policy Development Group, leting oil executives set policy and then refusing to release any records of the meeting?"

It's so cute to watch (panicked) libs conflate politicians with news media. The MSM is always lecturing us about how impartial they are, irrespective of their personal political views. Any then mocking anyone who thinks otherwise.

My lib friends do this all the time. If I mention some rather obvious differences in coverage of a Republican vs that of a Democrat, or biased wording, etc..I always get something along the lines of "But Republicans do this too!"

My answer, "Of course they do. They're politicians. So are Democrats. But we're talking about the media here."

It's funny how they unthinkingly conflate the media with the Democrats in their responses.

I keep all of my business emails and those pertaining to some organizations of which I am either a board member of officer. They are archived on DVDs by year and category.

My business emails are also kept and reviewed by my immediates office of supervisory jurisdiction and stored in permanent archives. Moral of that story is don't send me an email if you don't want it kept forever.

Professor Ann A, Let us hope you get the Archive. You write the best-seller and you and Meade can travel the world. I hope it happens.

But, let me guess the members here of the JournoList. They would have to be friends of Ezra, as then he would invite. Who are his friends? Matt Y., Andy Sully, someone from NYT, MSNBC (Keith?), etc.

Predict the members. Get the to deny. This would encourage someone to collect the $100K.

I think it is cowardice of Klein and others on the list (strategizing how to fool the public so as to hide the truth of bad democrats) is making me upset. I am committed democrat but I cannot be around losers like Klein, Weigel, and other pseduo-intellectuals.

If you are a straight male, and you find that you suddenly have a fleeting crush on Andrew Breitbart today, you should know that this does not indicate that you are truly gay, only that you recognize awesome.

"There's many hands involved in keeping modern IT infrastructure working, and almost all of those people have access at some point to your data once it leaves your PC. They're just too overwhelmed to care what it is most of the time."

But since 100 large is on the line ... I'll be restoring that backup to my hard drive and sneaker-netting it over to Andrew for the cash. Thank you very much.

And any IT employee in the Journo-list food chain would be smart to do the same.

$100K is a lot of scratch, people, especially at these newspapers paying these stupid children to report the "news" while simultaneously creating a fucking "actual malice" trail a mile fucking long.

Some publishers had better get their fucking heads out of their asses before this little game gets out of hand.

It's time for the grown-ups to exert some discipline on these kiddies and yank their reigns.

Scott: I think the conservative version of JournoList is unlikely to exist.

We already proved that more than one conservative list-serv, described as similar to JournoList, exist. InstaPundit isn't interested in letting you know that hey exist. Althouse isn't curious about what's going on on them. Breitbart hasn't offered money for their archives.

Odd that the conservative bloggers who want us to push so hard for the archives of JournoList also don't seem to want us to know anything at all about the conservative list-servs. They're quite happy to have you believing, as you do, that such conservative list-servs are "unlikely to exist".

For example, conservaive blogger Jeff Dunez confessed in a piece on the site Big Journalism:

"I am a member of two conservative blogger/journalist lists similar to the liberal one that got Wiegel in trouble. Among the members of each list there is a strict understanding of “omerta,” what’s said on the list stays on the list. So there is some compassion for Weigel because someone broke his trust."

And another conservative admitted:

I’m on a bunch of conservative listservs. I won’t violate their off-the-record policies by publishing specific comments here, but I will say upfront that there are things I see daily on most of them that, if the comments ever appeared in public, would result in a lot of egg on face….

Those links and others are in that thread fromthe other day; I don't feel like moving all the links to this thread.

What if I told you I ran a secret e-mail list that connected progressive writers with staffers for Democratic politicians so that those staffers could tell the progressives what, exactly, their bosses wanted them writing about that day?

Sadly, I don't run such a list. Never have, either. The rule for Journolist was that no one who worked for the government in any capacity could join or, if they took a job with the government, remain. But it turns out that there is exactly such a list on the right. Dan Riehl, a prominent conservative blogger, revealed its existence today when he quit in a huff because John Boehner's director of new media hurt his feelings.

It was, he said, "a private RNC-related Listserv," and in publishing comments from it, he was "violating the presumed TOS [terms of service] for the private list."

I would definitely be interested in a list like that but not as interested because it's not likely to have been very influential. There just aren't enough conservative journalists for them to steer a narrative.

You see, Scott, InstaPundit is the kind of blogger who will, on the same day, be linking to Breitbart's cash reward to expose the JournoList archives while also throwing links to conservative bloggers he knows very well are coordinating their Republican propaganda on conservative list-servs.

And then, Scott, he'll read a comment like yours where you seem to believe that it's unlikely that conservative list-servs like JounroList exist, and he will smile at how his tactics worked on you.

The insideous nature of JournoList is that, by Ezra Klein's design, it paired policy pimps with journalists. That is a truly nasty combination. Ethical journalists should not get naked with their sources, period. Massively uncool. That's why I agree with Andrew Breitbart. The archive is worth $100k.

As for conservative listservs, of course they exist. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands; as there are politically oriented lists of every type.

But again, I don't think that there is one that pairs conservative journalists with conservative policy wonks, simply because there aren't that many conservative journalists (you couldn't fill a small hotel ballroom with them), and there's no gain for policy pimps to co-opt them.

This was not traditional email. I was a listserve where members log in and look at the many comments of vaious topics. Typically, a member would ask "Hey did you see Meet The Press on Sunday? and put a subject in the topic line.

Then whoever responded would cary the same topic line in their comment AND THE NAME OF THE RESPONDER OR COMMENTER. So the entire history of comments is maintained by the ISP provider {Google?} who hosted the listserve. Generally only the list serve administrator or moderator [Ezra Klein?] could delete comments.

We went through this yesterday. So what if the Republicans have a listserve where the House minority leader can distribute the party line. I have no doubt that the Democrats at some level do too. Or, at least both parties had FAX lists that they used for this purpose. Listserves are fairly old technology (I joined my first one some 20 or so years ago), and so am not surprised that the Republicans have discovered this technology.

But there is no indication that this GOP list has hundreds of "journalists" participating, and esp. those that at least pretend to be unbiased. And it is unlikely that you would find a concerted effort to change the subject or suppress news stories by those actually writing the news stories, to a unified political end on any GOP list.

No, what we are seeing here is the Journolist people trying desperately to change the subject to the Republicans do the same thing, except, of course, that they don't. They know that they were caught this time around, and are desperate not to have their work of the last 4 or so years exposed for what it was - highly partisan management of the news for political advantage, all the while pretending to be unbiased journalists just reporting the news.

@AJ Lynch: Good point. A person can login to their Google Groups account and look at the messages online. But they also have the option to have the group messages sent to them.

In your opinion, out of, say, 400 people in the list, what's your best SWAG about how many chose to have their messages sent to them; and of those, how many had the messages filtered to a folder in their email client? I'm guessing it might be around 1% (4 or so people). But I've never done that kind of admin before so your insights would be valuable.

I have belonged to a few and never used that option [of emailing every comment to my own email].

I suspect it would be minimal because why junk your email with every comment from the listserve. Plus even if you had the emails sent to your private email, your responses to the listserve are part of the archive.

I see the leftists in this thread largely taking the same tack: conservatives could have a similar group. The difference, left unsaid, naturally, is that there are virtually no conservatives working at news entities that hold themselves out as neutral and objective. If some people at National Review and Commentary, etc. have a group, who cares? Those entities are outwardly conservative and outwardly trying to shape the news.

The difference here is that something is being done privately to shape the news and then present it as objective.

All of that said, there's no way this archive is worth $100,000. Maybe $2500. I'd say $5000 tops.

Reading the Journolist archive will be like reading the Ingredients and Nutritional Info. panels on a box of breakfast cereal.Instead of learning that I'm getting 20% of my daily Niacin in a bowl of Crispix, I'll learn how much of my daily Bolshevism I'm getting in 15 minutes of CNN.

Why doesn't Althouse send her entire email archive up on a post, to show she is serious?

Please explain the demented reasoning by which sharing her email with the world would "show she is serious" about wanting to see the contents of JournoList.

That's like saying that any man serious about wanting to see Megan Fox in her birthday suit should post naked photos of himself to the Internet. It might make sense on your planet but it doesn't bear much resemblance to Earth logic.

"Why doesn't Althouse send her entire email archive up on a post, to show she is serious?"

Because she doesn't have to you fucking dolt.

What don't you get about this, Garage?

Do you think it's a game of Even Steven?

It's not.

There are 400 journalists who are conspiring to shape what gets said in the nation's newspapers.

And then there's Ann.

Now, I know you can't see the difference because you're a fucking douchebag tool and we have access to your archive of oneliners here and so we don't expect you to be able to figure out why 400 elite newsmakers all working in tandem with Barack Obama represents a New American Reich.

So why don't you just retire to bed, kiddie while the adults discuss how we're going to bitch-slap your Sophomore Class President.

Please explain the demented reasoning by which sharing her email with the world would "show she is serious" about wanting to see the contents of JournoList.

Because she is asking other people to show their archives. Al Gore has a big house and all....This is a great chance to show everyone that she isn't like one of those weasely hypocritical liberals that don't practice what they preach.

As in, we 400 journalists who work for ostensibly objective organizations should not report about the event, or we should make sure to report these facts and not those facts. Or one of the journalists is libeling someone, instantaneously.

Get a clue and try to grasp the concept of a listserve. It ain't the same as an email account.

Well she gets links by conservative journalists, she writes for the NY Times. She is a frequent guest on Wisconsin radio. Blogginheads. How do we know she isn't colluding with all of them? It's not pure to withhold this information. Maybe she was trashing some liberal, thereby hurting their career.

Garage -- Please put your archive up of all your emails to any list-serv you may be a party to.

I'm not on any listervs. I don't even comment on other blogs, very rarely. But feel free to google!

But your claims are ridiculous at face value, as any independent or centrist can attest. Simply put, there are not 400 conservative journalists employed in the US, so having a list comparable to the one with 400 of the most influential liberal journalists would be impossible.

From what I understand, the 400 number is an estimate of the total number of list subscribers. Journalists comprise only part of that. The rest are policy pimps working for institutions that attempt to influence policy -- think tanks, unions, other leftish special interests.

And Monty brings up what I was thinking of... only to different results.

"Yeah Blake, because the revelation that the White House press office was basically employing an ex gay porn star who worked for a fake paper to ask softball questions during press conferences is EXACTLY the same thing as left of center journalists and policy people having a listserv."

The shock and horror over Gannon (and the need to damn someone forever for past sexual indiscretions) always amazed me.

Part of me also wants to be profoundly uninterested in what the Journolisters did and said on their off-time. By *MY* way of thinking it really doesn't matter who they are as a person or what they say when they are drunk and among friends.

But the outrage over Gannon wasn't just (or even mostly) about what he'd done for money, it was about the fact that he was just a *guy*. He was a little guy who wrote for a little paper and asked little questions.

The profound insult some people took at that is the *only* reason I think that the journolist archive should be exposed.

Because the Emperor has no clothes.

And it would be a profoundly good thing for our society if we stopped pretending that he does.

why do I think Breitbart already has the Journolist and is publicizing the $100k offer to raise interest and make the lefties look like disloyal sellouts once he publishes it?

That's funny, because it ties in with an article a read a few weeks back on Pakistan. The Jihadis are busy beheading each other in a fruitless effort to root out US spies. Their leaders are getting picked off pretty regularly in US drone strikes.

The part that makes it funny is most of the targeting data is reportedly coming from US signals intelligence and not agents.

Simply put, there are not 400 conservative journalists employed in the US, so having a list comparable to the one with 400 of the most influential liberal journalists would be impossible.

I suspect there are a lot more than 400 conservative journalists in America, from people working at Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to TV stations and newspapers in small towns. And the Journolist group, by its own descriptions, included bloggers and op-ed writers like Paul Krugman. It wasn't just composed of beat reporters. One could put together a listserv of 400 conservative journalists, bloggers and op-ed writers from around the country, if one wanted to do so, and as has been pointed out here and elsewhere, such listservs do exist. (See LoafingOaf @6:21pm.) Something tells me the purpose of such conservative listservs isn't just to trade recipes.

Breitbart is hated/made fun of/trivialized regularly, and voraciously. And in exact proportion to his effectiveness.

Agree with Freeman: he rules. Anyone who has ever heard him guest host on Dennis Miller, or seen him on Red Eye, knows he is also a good guy, and very funny. He is a little more tightly wound than he used to be--but he has since become a big target for the left, who (rightly) perceive him to be their most dangerous opponent.

Go Andrew. You're fighting the good fight.

Lefties tried to tell us the ACORN was no big, and now it's Journolist. Methinks thou dost... etc.

@somefeller: Nice try. But the dynamic of politics on the right of center, and of those of us of a libertarian stripe, is completely different from the left.

People on the right don't have to constantly check with their peers about what to think.

Again (and again and again): Ezra Klein created JournoList specifically to enable leftish policy pimps to co-opt leftish journalists. This is what made it ugly. It was not some run-of-the-mill political listserv, of which there are a zillion.

But the dynamic of politics on the right of center, and of those of us of a libertarian stripe, is completely different from the left. People on the right don't have to constantly check with their peers about what to think.

Yadda yadda. In other words, we're not like those guys.

People on all sides of the political spectrum have their little email lists, listservs and discussion trees (most of which are pretty tedious), and stories or memes get pushed through them. That's the way things work with online media, which in turn influences the mainstream media.